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There is considerable interest within the design research domain in the possible cognitive functions and actions as ‘design thinking’ is used. This proposal commences with reference to Senge who suggests, “Truly creative people use the gap between vision and current reality to generate energy for change”. He drew from the musician Fritz, who proposed, “It’s not what the vision is but what the vision does,” (1990, p.153). The imagined ideal in a vision seems to act like a spike setting off self-urging creative intuitions and insights and instinctive reactions. A conceptual series of diagrams will develop these insights where an imagined ideal is to be set up as the vision as the anticipated experience of a ‘best-possible-self’ with success, where emergent ‘ideas-of-best-fit’ closely match the designer’s goals and desires. The triggering mental actions required are similar in form to De Bono’s technique based on ‘Six Colored Hats’ (1985). In this project, however, the practitioner adopts an overarching meaningful ideal for a ‘hat’ in the form of an experiential clear sense of success as motivating ideations emerge, such that these closely match their goals and desires as a ‘best-possible-fit’. The model is also potentially transformative as the visioning ideal could be framed such that any emergent effects of encoded formed bias or a self-limiting psychology could be effectively reduced or eliminated through the applied created differential as a ‘generative gap’ for the self. This paper will further suggest how this envisaged ideal of success could be experientially explored through co-creative action cycles of research in different design-thinking domains.

Identifying Infants can be harder than it seems. Particularly in remote and limited resources settings, rapid and accurate identification of infants presents an unsolved complex sociotechnical problem. Imagine a long line of caregivers, each carrying several children, waiting outside in heat and humidity for required vaccinations. Caregivers may only know the infant's given names: how can the they be identified for record keeping?
Vaccination cards are notoriously unreliably and easily lost, mistakes abound. Recent technologycentered attempts th
In order to develop a new, infant-centered solution from the ground up, we assembled a diverse team of engineers, clinicians, ethnographers and designers and followed a Human Centered Design (HCD) approach of ethnography, rapid prototyping and testing. We examined all common modalities used in adult biometrics-- ear, iris, retina, face, foot, palm and finger recognition and compared technical feasibility, usability and acceptability for the infant use case. We prototyped many infant-centric devices and arrived at lead candidates using modified contact vs non contact palm and finger scanning. Frequent design-test cycles were critical as the complexity and changing nature of infant physiology, behavior and caregiver dynamics could not be predicted, only tested with subjects. This was compounded by moving targets of evolving infant-centric software, hardware and device design.
In summary, we report here an HCD based approach to infant biometrics. We developed and tested robust, socially acceptable technologies that adapt to the tiny, sensitive yet changing fingers of very young infants.

As society shifts towards an increasingly sustainable future, high-performance buildings can provide a means to meet sustainability and energy efficiency goals. Occupants in high-performance buildings are often expected to interact with building systems to maintain individual levels of comfort and productivity. However, the critical role of the human-building interface is often ignored (Day & Heschong, 2016). Too often, building controls are not intuitive and poorly understood by typical users. Conversely, some buildings rely on entirely automated building systems (e.g. lighting, shading, HVAC systems), which take control away from occupants. This approach is largely unpopular with building occupants. The literature suggests people desire and prefer control of their interior environments (e.g., Escuyer & Fontoynont, 2001). Designing a high-performance building that effectively engages users presents a more complex problem than most designers are prepared to handle.
Design teams require an ability to see the whole situation—from how the parts of the system work to how users will engage and adapt the system. This ability relies on systematic efforts to understand broad swaths of human behavior and design research, which go beyond computation or modeling (e.g., Huppatz, 2015; Rittel & Webber, 1973). In this context, design and design research supports third order (activities and processes) and fourth order (environments, organizations, and systems) design problems (Buchanan, 1999). Creating design teams, who can comprehend a whole situation, requires reframing how clients and designers understand design problems. This draft paper links theory about design problems with practical processes for using design research to improve the human-building interface.

Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design partnered with Cognizant Technology Solutions on a design project for a semester-long elective course called UX Design Tools. The intent was broad in its inception: identify emergent opportunities where technology will play a significant role in people's interactions and experiences. What is the future of physical space? How are advancements in IoT, augmented reality, and telematics influencing how we experience environments?
Students were asked to anchor their problem solving in evolving human needs and to understand the role technology plays. Cognizant's human-centered development approach relies primarily on ethnographic inquiry. This evidenced through integrating their anthropologists from acquired firm Idea Couture, and associates from strategic partner ReD Associates. The interdisciplinary majors from upper-level undergraduate to graduate level students learned to use and create multi- method research approaches to identify unique opportunities.
Seven teams created future scenarios with newly developed physical product designs, digital interfaces, and new service strategies utilizing various technologies. Three case studies highlight a trio of observed emotional themes in relation to how people utilize technology to benefit their daily life or work: self-
election, introduction-exchange, and co-dependency.
This poster presentation will showcase three projects that will serve as examples of how industry and academia act as research and development entities; how to approach research as a
fundamental tenet for innovation and design; and show how breadth and depth of interdisciplinary skills and experience is a necessity in an ever expanding climate of technology push.

Smart home is becoming a focus in both literature and product development practices. The current study employed a human-centered design approach to understand users desires and expectations from their living context. Six critical themes were developed via in-deep interview, field observation, and data analysis. They are house as a supportive friend, atmosphere generator, theme songs for every moment, coordinator and reminder, life memory collector, and routine builder for young generations. Those concepts were partially integrated to define the value proposition for the target user group of parents with young children. This guides the design ideation and video prototyping to illustrator the user experiences. Through a focus group discussion, the design concepts were validated with six potential customers. The results also show that the design concept has the potential to motivate children’s behaviors, help to build their routine, and has the flexibility to fulfill different needs toward the changes of the family’s life cycle.

The deterioration of linguistic abilities is a natural phenomenon along with aging. Therefore, various assessment tools have been developed to measure linguistic abilities of seniors and diagnose
degenerative diseases such as dementia. Although most of the tools are composed of images, there are not many studies focusing on the visual design, which could significantly affect performance of the subject. In this regard, this research aims to suggest a design guideline for linguistic ability assessment tools concerning the key characteristics of the elderly, focusing on visual contents and interface.
Existing related researches were mostly conducted in English speaking countries. In order to assess the language processing abilities of Korean-speaking elders more accurately, it is necessary to develop language processing assessment tools that reflect the unique linguistic features and structure of the Korean language. Regarding the existing tools, there is a lack of research on aging, focusing on ‘verb naming.
In the literature review section, the paper investigated the physical, cognitive and emotional characteristics of the elderly and extracted the key elements to consider when designing for the elderly. Also, design principles were found based on case studies and problem analysis of the existing assessment tools for language processing abilities. Lastly, we created a prototype model using ‘verb naming.’ Using the model, we have conducted an experiment and comparative analysis between different age groups to verify the validity of contents.
In conclusion, we provided a design guideline for visual contents and interface of linguistic assessment tools, focusing on elderly users.

Western cultures focus on salient objects and use categorization for purposes of organizing the environment (an analytic view), whereas, East Asians cultures focus more holistically on relationships and similarities among objects when organizing the environment (a holistic view). Previous research has shown that cognitive approaches differ between cultures: European Americans prefer an analytic style, and East Asians tend to use a holistic style. However, little is known about how cultural differences in cognition relate to aesthetic preferences. In this paper, we explored whether cultural differences arise in preferences for products set in matching vs. mismatching contexts. Participants in a laboratory experiment included European Americans and East Asians. Individually, they viewed images of a variety of furniture products (chairs, coffee tables, and floor lamps) and rated their aesthetic appeal. Each product type appeared in three different contexts: matching (target product shown in its usual in-home context); mismatched (target product shown in an unusual in-home context), and neutral (the target product shown on a white background). For both cultural groups, products were judged to be more aesthetically pleasing in the matching than in the mismatched context. However, ratings for products in mismatching contexts were significantly higher among East Asians. Our findings suggest that those with holistic views (East Asians) are more tolerant of mismatches than are those with more analytic views (European Americans). The implications for product and marketing design include greater attention to context presentation.

Learning pressure affects students’ learning process and performance. Industrial design education emphasizes that operations on real design problems that have heavy working loads may cause learning pressure. The purpose of this study is to explore the issues causing learning pressure and the pressure management strategies of undergraduate industrial design students. There were 297 students who participated in the questionnaire survey. The main findings are as follows: First, learning pressure includes academic pressure, peer pressure, self-expectations, time pressure, financial pressure, pressure from instructors, external pressure, future career, pressure from parents, resource pressure, achievement, and situational pressure. In addition, the main learning pressure is caused by finance, time, resources, external issues, and future career. Second, the pressure management strategies include problem solving, procrastination and escape, help seeking, leisure, emotional management, and self-adjustment. The most useful strategy for managing pressure is leisure, and procrastination and escape is the least useful strategy. Third, all learning pressures are significantly correlated with procrastination and escape strategy, but the coefficients are low. The results can be a reference for industrial design education and related research.

Designing successful products and services that people like, requires an understanding of the context and the aspirations of those people. Over the past decade, a range of methods has been developed to help designers gain such empathy. These have worked well when designer and target user share a cultural context. However, designers often find it difficult to empathize with the user insights of individuals from a culture beyond their first-hand experience. To help designers step beyond this limitation, those user insights need to be placed in a larger understanding of the cultural context. In this paper, we present Cultura: a toolkit that uses nine cultural aspects based on cultural models, informing designers about user insights in a broader cultural context. The toolkit was evaluated in design sessions with four design teams. The findings indicate that Cultura provides inspiration and motivation for designers to gain empathic insights into users beyond their own cultural boundaries and to make effective designs for people.

Developing successful RNPs can bring competitive advantages for companies. However, the success rate of RNPs are relatively low because consumers often feel resistant to adopt
them. One reason for consumers’ resistance is their lack of comprehension of RNPs. To facilitate consumers’ comprehension, this paper conceptually discusses the opportunities related to designing the appearances of RNPs. More specifically, to facilitate consumers’ internal and external learning, this paper explores four underlying mechanisms: 1) product appearance as a visual cue to trigger category-based knowledge transfer, 2) to trigger analogy-based knowledge transfer, 3) product appearance as an information carrier to communicate innovative functionality directly, and 4) product appearance as a way to trigger congruity with innovative functionality of RNPs. The rationales for each underlying
mechanism are conceptually discussed, supported with relevant empirical evidence and examples found in the markets.